Photo by Ash Daniel
What: Painting, sculpture and drawing
Kendra Dawn Wadsworth is a rule breaker. If someone issues a decree, she’ll do something else. Her art supplies — roofing tar, wax, paint — come from Lowe’s. She attaches pencils, pens and cardboards to the bit of a hand drill, letting the tool spin almost out of control onto pieces of thick paper.
And yet the resulting drawings are gridlike and organized, with a topographic look.
“Adaptation,” speckled brown clay, steel, lichen glaze, 11 by 15 by 6 inches
“It’s very intuitive,” Wadsworth says. “I don’t really know what is going to happen. I just start, and it basically kind of controls me. It’s my guide. I often talk to my students about improvisation, like a dance. If you push against somebody, what’s their reaction going to be?”
Wadsworth works in multiple media — painting, sculpture and drawing — and teaches fine art classes at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In 2018, Quirk Gallery hosted her solo exhibition; some of Wadsworth’s pieces are in its archives now.
After growing up in Colonial Heights, Wadsworth studied painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University and then received her MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, she became a union scenic artist for plays and movies. Her most creatively significant work in film, Wadsworth says, was creating installations for the 2001 Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind.” She covered walls with paper collages in the backyard shed office used by the brilliant yet mentally disturbed mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe.
“Cellular Divide,” acrylic, oil, tar, graphite on canvas, 42 by 48 inches
“They decided that I was crazy enough to do it,” she says. “They handed me the script and basically said, ‘Come up with something.’ ” Working in film gave her some of the techniques she uses in her paintings, making them look crackled and aged and thickly textured. Daubs of yellow, influenced by her grandmother’s kitchen, brighten her pieces.
In recent years, Wadsworth has focused on ceramic work, particularly raku firing techniques. As a younger artist, “I dabbled here and there with clay,” she says, making cups and bowls, but now she creates more decorative sculptures that she calls “loaves,” taking the shape of a sliced loaf of bread, or a cocoon. Other pieces are more loosely constructed, with twisted bars of metal pushed into the clay.
Her mother-in-law’s terminal brain tumor diagnosis a couple of years ago “had a huge influence on my work as an artist, because that’s what I do — work through life through art, kind of as a release or therapy,” she says. “I would throw pottery as a whole piece and then start deconstructing it. I was wandering a lot, walking on the [train] tracks, so the metalwork is found from Great Shiplock Park, off the railroad.”
And, the self-proclaimed rule breaker notes with a laugh, “I did not trespass or steal anything.”
Photo by Taylor Dabney
Don't Miss: Within Reach 2019, Artspace gallery’s fourth annual benefit exhibition and art auction on Saturday, March 9, from 6 to 9:30 p.m. Featuring a room with $45 artworks and a live auction of works from more than 60 local artists. Tickets are $25 through March 8; $50 at the door. 0 E. Fourth St.
